Progress in Reactive Printing of Self Assembled Materials and Melt Spinning of Flexible Silicon

Ghassan Jabbour
Professor and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Engineered Advanced Materials and Devices,
University of Ottawa

Abstract

Perhaps some of the most important and urgent Grand Challenges facing the inhabitants of this earth which need our immediate attention are: 1) Energy, 2) Water, and 3) Food Resources. Although the intention was not to place “energy” as the top challenge, in many respects the latter two cannot be addressed successfully on a wider and more accessible scale without low cost and low power consumption approaches to their production.  One of our research themes focuses on developing and implementing environmentally friendly processing and device testing approaches. The target is to realize sustainable development and manufacturing of multi-scale functional materials, devices and systems, for applications in areas including, but not limited to, power generation, solid-state-lighting, energy conversion and storage, and light weight alloys. Throughout the research, efforts are made to eliminate as many energy-demanding processing steps as possible, without sacrificing device performance or materials specifications. In this venue, I will review our advances on two of our research topics aiming at preparing the foundational work for their low-cost R2R manufacturing:

1. Reactive Printing Fabrication of self-assembled nanoparticles and quantum dots, and
2. Melt spinning approach to flexible silicon substrates.